... Not only did the judge deem EULAs enforeceable, but he made no stipulations about seeing the EULA before time of purchase.
That was in the US, was it not? In Europe, the opposite is true: EULA conditions which are not available to the customer prior to the sale are not enforcable.
Further, while acknowledging certain "fair use" rights, he determined that you can sign away those rights under a EULA, as well as any rights you have under the First Sale doctrine, including reselling your personal copy of the software.
MS actually lost a case in Europe, against OEM resellers who were selling OEM Windows separately from any hardware. I think a new copy of WinXP Home (OEM version) costs around 80 Euros - no hardware purchase required. This is not something that MS can change, even if it is written in the EULA (I don't know if it is, though).
In short, European users can ignore the EULA, and proceed to behave in line with the normal legal requirements - which allow reverse engineering and reselling.
I think the judge in the bnetd case came to the wrong conclusion with regards to the EULA - it it reasonable to expect that all conditions of a purchase may be known at the time the purchase is made. It is therefore unreasonable that post-purchase conditions are even considered as being valid, especially when the conditions deny the user rights which are prescribed by law. I wonder if the judge thinks that EULAs of preinstalled software should apply to users who have never even had a chance to see them.
FYI... SuSE uses/etc/sysconfig too. I think they introduced it in 8.0. That made changing stuff much simpler.
However, running through all the conf.d scripts everytime you add a new package is annoying - especially on a slow machine. They should at least modify the scripts to check the timestamp of their config (in) files against the generated config (out) files, and exit straight away if nothing's newer. Maybe some do, but it doesn't seem like it to me (and I can't check now).
While they're at it, they should hack insserv to generate a Makefile, and have init use make to start/stop services, as somebody already did. That'd speed up the boot/shutdown sequence somewhat.
You don't pay every time you call your voicemail. Voicemail is always a free call.
Where? Mine certainly wasn't (in Germany). I saved a lot of money by disabling it.
Besides, nobody pays by the minute any more anyway.
I think everybody here does. Some tarifs give you a certain number of minutes free per month though.
Then the system logs the call, sends you an sms with the number that called, thus you being aware the moment you turn your phone on that you have been called.
Yes, except for the SMS part.
Maybe not for you, but I get the SMS messages just like he does. I prefer that to voicemail.
You seem to have a strange idea of acceptability. Just because I have a mobile phone doesn't mean I have or even want to be reachable the whole time. I check my messages (SMS) and call people back at my own convenience. I definately don't like the idea of being dictated to when I have to have the stupid thing turned on - I don't find that acceptable at all!
Same in Germany: hast du mein SMS gelesen? To be honest though, it's not actually logical to call the message a Short Message Service.
The article is not quite right about one thing though: they say people prefer to send SMS messages than call each other in Europe. That's not true these days. The price of calls has come down a lot, but the price of sending a short text message has gone up (at least in Germany it has). I can talk for at least a couple of minutes for the price of an SMS message, which is ludicrous when you consider the amount of data/bandwidth involved. They're ripping us off!
It wasn't all that long ago that I found out that US people have to pay to receive mobile calls. That must suck, especially when they've had such good flat rate landline conditions for so long (compared to Europe).
The whole US thing with assigning mobile numbers to stationary physical area codes seems strange to me too.
The article was right about how good GSM is though. You can literally wander across the whole of Europe, and use just one phone everywhere. Actually, you can even use the same phone in the middle of the desert in Namibia (Africa), where the signal strength is surprisingly good. Is coverage really that bad in the US?
Worcester's basically the place that mothers tell their kids about to make them eat their vegetables or whatever. And it's not an interesting place.
Certainly I think we can all agree that there's nothing further out, that the cosmos more or less ends at 495 except for Worcester which is sort of barely attached by 9 and the Pike.
B-b-but surely! Worcester is where Worcester sauce comes from! How can that not be interesting!
And what was that about the 9? Worcester is on the 5 (the M5) halfway between Gloucester and Birmingham.
You'll be telling me next that Boston isn't in Lincolnshire.
Now, I don't know whether the cosmos ends near Worcester or Boston, but I can tell you that there's nothing of interest north of the Watford Gap (or west of Reading for that matter). What I want to know is why the Watford Gap isn't anywhere near Watford.
Oddly enough, there hasn't been that much CeBit stuff on/. in comparison to what is actually going on there. I've read articles about some really cool stuff. If you can read German, there's good coverage on the German tech news site Heise.
You've covered the associated costs of the physical part, but you also have to include the fact that you are guaranteed a certain quality of picture/sound from the DVD which might not be the case for an online solution, you can watch the DVD whenever and as often as you like, and when you're fed up with it, you can sell it. The DVDs often have interviews, "making of" programmes and other bits and bobs which give them extra value. Also - no commercial breaks during the individual episodes.
Would an online solution provide all the same functioniality? Can I resell, and can I buy second hand? Can I (legally) borrow episodes off a friend to watch as I currently do with DVDs? A streaming-only solution might get around the "when" problem, possibly even the "how often" problem too, but would impose other limitations.
Without these freedoms, an online episode is not worth anywhere near the cost of the same episode on DVD.
Now here's a thing.. how many episodes does Friends S9 have? 20? At 20 mins each, that's 400 minutes of TV; at $30, a dollar buys you 13.333 minutes (not including any bonus material). That's roughly 4 times as long as a typical pop song, right? With this logic, a pop song should cost a quarter of what it does now, but the money-grabbing RIAA want to push the prices up.
My theory is this: if the price is too high, people won't buy! Especially for restricted items that cannot be resold or reused elsewhere. They (MPAA/RIAA et al) are DRMing themselves into a hole... it'll get worse for the buyer, but if somebody can offer a usable solution at a reasonable price, that'll effectively tip earth into the DRM hole, which turns it into their grave. They will be their own undoing!
all else equal.. two cores, two times the power, two times the heat..
You haven't been paying attention! Go back and read this article again (about AMD's demo of their dual core processor). While you're at it, read the related/. article.
The dual core processors use nowhere near double the power and produce nowhere near double the heat.
One thing that was an annoyance about OO.o 1.x was that you needed a complete new installation if you wanted a different language. I have users who have different language preferences using the same system, and while the desktop software (KDE in this case) can be switched, OO.o couldn't.
Well, that's now fixed in 2.0! You can add language packs to an existing installation! spec link
Yay!
-- Steve
PS. Anyone know if Firefox can/will support this functionality?
There was a court case in Germany, where OEM versions of Windows were being sold without any machine. MS didn't like it and went to court, but the court told them they aren't allowed to place any restrictions on the resale of these legally bought items.
I can buy WinXP Home OEM (new) for 80 Euros right now, on its own, perfectly legally.
I don't think the one-PC-only thing is fair at all. It's very consumer-unfriendly.
What protects consumers from fraudulent merchants waving some kind of electronic cash-sucking wand by your back pocket which contains your wallet which contains your RFID Visa card? There's no mention of this in the article at all!
That's easy to answer! It's almost certainly based on the technology they already use.
VISA and others have been making smart cards for a while - they have a chip in which a smart card reader can talk to. You've probably seen cards with the contacts on the front already. The whole point of these cards is to cut down fraud, especially by card duplication. It's relatively easy to reproduce what is on the magnetic stripe, as the information is static.
These chips are used as part of an "online" transaction: the terminal (card reader) connects to the service provider's system, which in turn connect to VISA. VISA issues a challenge, the card's chip issues a response, and VISA verifies the card. This way, you can instantly detect fake or blacklisted cards. (If you lose your card, always call them immediately!) The challenge is unique every time, and a PIN/signature may still be required, possibly depending on the amount.
The retailer is guaranteed payment for such transactions, even it the charge is contested. Such online transactions cost the retailer more than offline ones, where the retailer takes the risk in case of fraud/chargeback. If you have to type in your PIN, it's online.
This new system will most likely be an extension of the smart card system. Even if somebody finds a way to challenge the card and get a response, they could only ever use that response against the same challenge from VISA for a charge on the exact same card. It may also be that the amount being charged affects the challenge and/or response too (I think so, but don't remember). It might be theoretically possible, but there is too much left to chance for it to be realistic. If they add an extra security layer to cover the wireless part, you are left with a very safe system.
If I wanted to get lots of money (illegally), I would turn my efforts to something which was easier and actually had a real chance of succeeding. Beware the old-fashioned pickpocket!
Yes well, that doesn't help Joe Sixpack who reads "CLICK YES TO CONTINUE" and does it.
At least he read it! I know plenty of people who will just click OK without even looking at what they're agreeing to.
The trouble is that lots of people don't understand what is being asked of them (so many give up reading at all). Signed certificate? While I could explain what it is, how do you teach people to be able to choose the good from the bad? Some are definately not so easy to spot.
Ol' Joe should be more distrusting of these things, but isn't.
... and the only 2 major apps that came with windows, which are windows media and ie.
What about Outlook Express? What about the messenger? What about the movie maker?
All of these came with my copy of Windows, and they are major apps which have real competitors. I'm wondering if MS will also get forced to offer versions of Windows with them removed as well.
MS is in the unfortunate position of being recognised as being a monopoly that uses its position to have an (illegal) advantage over others. As you pointed out, they are trying to show they're not, but it won't work until they lose a very significant part of their market share. Until then, every time they try to use bundling (with Windows) to enhance their products, they will get scrutinised, and quite possibly dragged in front of the courts again.
As a comparison, have a look at what IBM went through after their whole monopoly thing. They went a long way out of their way to avoid trouble, and it really cost them. However, they managed to reinvent themselves, and I think it's actually done them good in the long run.
It's obvious enough what effect it would have if MS could no longer include certain apps with Windows. They'd still be available for download for those who wanted them, but imagine what it would be like if MS were not allowed to give them away at all. Would you pay for WMP, the messenger or the movie maker?
As you say, I think a stripped down version of Windows will encourage competition, and give people more of an incentive to consider alternatives.
Certainly, XP (also 2K, 2K3) would have been an interesting comparison. OSX, however, is out of the question - all of the others ran on exactly the same hardware, a dual 1GHz PIII system. The point of the test was to see operating differences, without the hardware being a factor.
Of course, it would be possible to run the tests on the same Mac under OSX, Linux and any other OS available for that platform. That might have been interesting, but you wouldn't be able to compare the results directly to those from the PIII system.
Bring back MPE/iX! Yes, the filesystem is a little weird, but the throughput is significantly better. Apparently, Oracle ran about 20% faster under MPE than HP-UX on the same hardware.
Stop wasting money on SAP already! Nobody in the company really likes it anyway. It has cost HP literally billions.
Carly killed the HP of old, along with the whole "HP Way". I think she managed to turn it into the place that Bill and Dave originally wanted to get away from, which is most ironic. I wonder if anybody left HP to start up their own company in their garage.
HP actually used to be a quite inventive place; now they only have it in their logo. Their test and measurement stuff was second to none (and even went to the moon); I think Carly farmed that off as part of Agilent. See this for a discussion on laser printers, including about how earlier HP printers are much better than their current crop.
HP didn't ever want to compete on price, but they're not competing on quality either, so they will lose unless they do something drastic... and this may have been it.
Well, the German plural of ox (die Ochse) is "Ochsen," and in German, you do have multiple "Boxen."
If the person who wrote the submission was German, I'm willing to forgive them. However, as "Carl" claims to have been born in Philadelphia (presumably the newer one in the US, and not the older one in the Middle East), he needs beating with at least two wet fish. Maybe it was the fault of the apes, although the spell in Elbonia probably didn't help.
It's pretty easy for an ISP to notice 100,000 emails from one sender pumping through their SMTP server...
That's the point though - they're not all from one sender anymore. If you Zombie 1000 PCs, and have each send 100 messages, you've still got your 100,000 and it's all from different people, so the traffic looks like lots of normal email, and as such you bypass the throttle.
I would guess that a lot of ISPs only do spam checking on mail coming in from outside, and not from their own users as that saves resources.
Like you say, there's still no excuse. I don't think these methods are entirely new, as this is generally how email viruses spread themselves. They should be checking all email, in and out, for spam and viruses, and rejecting bad email before it is queued (ie: the client can't even complete sending).
Well, I wouldn't hold your breath. It's certainly not impossible that the US patent system will be changed, but I don't see it happenning in the near future.
We'll have to first wait and see how the whole thing in Europe turns out. It's still possible that they say that any software algorithms can be patented. I think that is now quite unlikely. Another possibility is that they say no software patents at all - my favourite, but we may not see it happen. The third option would be that they come up with some definition of what is patentable, and we see some restricted form of software patents.
I think that third option is what a lot of them will be aiming for, but I think they will have a hard time getting enough people to agree on what should be patentable, in which case I think we're more likely to end up with no software patents at all, as a number of countries are very much against a free-for-all - Poland and Denmark have been mentioned already; the German parliament agreed that SW patents are not good (that's all 4 major parties, and they almost never all agree with each other), and there may be hope for the UK too. Certainly, the UK patent office is very aware of the problems that patent abuse can cause, as reported here, and maybe, just maybe, the governement will listen.
If the EU actually does rule against software patents, it will be a very compelling reason for IT companies to do development in the EU rather than in the US, and that is something that may trigger the US to review their system, but that will all take time.
Patents are supposed to encourage people to invent and disclose, so that everyone can benefit. If that is not happenning, then patents are not working and the goal is not being reached. Many are using patents as a form of protectionism, and this abuse is something that the EU now has a chance to address. I really hope they do.
Until now, Google was my preferred search engine, so that is what I am comparing against.
I clicked the link in the story, which brings up the main MSN page. It's yet another site that doesn't use the whole browser width (and that is getting really annoying). It's also full of crap I'm not interested in (more on that below) and I notice that it tried to pop something up.
There's an ad for their search, so I clicked that, but it redirects via atdmt.com, which is either a tracker site or an ad site. Either way, it was on my blocklist, so the browser went nowhere.
So far, not impressed.
Then it occurred to me that the search site is probably separate from the main MSN site, so I tried search.msn.com. Lo and behold, a lightweight page for entering my search query, in a similar manner to Google's. No ads on this page either! I liked that. OK, so the URL is a little longer than Google's, but these days I do my searching from that input field in the top-right corner of Konqueror/Firefox.
It also correctly detected which country I'm in - presumably from the IP address or hostname. (The MSN main page didn't, and gave me loads of US-centric stuff instead, which is what I meant by stuff I'm not interested in.) It also used localised text for the country I'm in (German). That's all well and good, but my browser settings actually specify en-gb first, so they get a point for being clever and detecting the country, but lose 10 points for completely ignoring my own preferences. I would expect the page in German if I went to msn.de, but the.com one shouldn't make such assumptions.
I tried searching for a few various things, and compared the results to Google. It seemed that some of the more obscure terms had better results in the MSN search. Certainly, each of the two would return a different set of results for the same query. I can't really say that one was definately better than the other - this is one of those things you have to try for yourself, and it will probably only become apparent after a non-trivial amount of usage.
One other thing that must be said to both MSN and Google: stop using bloody fixed width columns!
I have a screen width of 1280, and in this day and age, much larger sizes are becoming more common. I want the width used more effectively so I don't have to scroll down as much. The HTML isn't even difficult! Annoying things like this give people reason to choose one site over another.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as they don't call anything "Yuri's Revenge" I guess I'll be happy...
-- Steve
That was in the US, was it not? In Europe, the opposite is true: EULA conditions which are not available to the customer prior to the sale are not enforcable.
Further, while acknowledging certain "fair use" rights, he determined that you can sign away those rights under a EULA, as well as any rights you have under the First Sale doctrine, including reselling your personal copy of the software.
MS actually lost a case in Europe, against OEM resellers who were selling OEM Windows separately from any hardware. I think a new copy of WinXP Home (OEM version) costs around 80 Euros - no hardware purchase required. This is not something that MS can change, even if it is written in the EULA (I don't know if it is, though).
In short, European users can ignore the EULA, and proceed to behave in line with the normal legal requirements - which allow reverse engineering and reselling.
I think the judge in the bnetd case came to the wrong conclusion with regards to the EULA - it it reasonable to expect that all conditions of a purchase may be known at the time the purchase is made. It is therefore unreasonable that post-purchase conditions are even considered as being valid, especially when the conditions deny the user rights which are prescribed by law. I wonder if the judge thinks that EULAs of preinstalled software should apply to users who have never even had a chance to see them.
-- Steve
FYI... SuSE uses /etc/sysconfig too. I think they introduced it in 8.0. That made changing stuff much simpler.
However, running through all the conf.d scripts everytime you add a new package is annoying - especially on a slow machine. They should at least modify the scripts to check the timestamp of their config (in) files against the generated config (out) files, and exit straight away if nothing's newer. Maybe some do, but it doesn't seem like it to me (and I can't check now).
While they're at it, they should hack insserv to generate a Makefile, and have init use make to start/stop services, as somebody already did. That'd speed up the boot/shutdown sequence somewhat.
-- Steve
You don't pay every time you call your voicemail. Voicemail is always a free call.
Where? Mine certainly wasn't (in Germany). I saved a lot of money by disabling it.
Besides, nobody pays by the minute any more anyway.
I think everybody here does. Some tarifs give you a certain number of minutes free per month though.
Yes, except for the SMS part.
Maybe not for you, but I get the SMS messages just like he does. I prefer that to voicemail.
You seem to have a strange idea of acceptability. Just because I have a mobile phone doesn't mean I have or even want to be reachable the whole time. I check my messages (SMS) and call people back at my own convenience. I definately don't like the idea of being dictated to when I have to have the stupid thing turned on - I don't find that acceptable at all!
-- Steve
Same in Germany: hast du mein SMS gelesen? To be honest though, it's not actually logical to call the message a Short Message Service.
The article is not quite right about one thing though: they say people prefer to send SMS messages than call each other in Europe. That's not true these days. The price of calls has come down a lot, but the price of sending a short text message has gone up (at least in Germany it has). I can talk for at least a couple of minutes for the price of an SMS message, which is ludicrous when you consider the amount of data/bandwidth involved. They're ripping us off!
It wasn't all that long ago that I found out that US people have to pay to receive mobile calls. That must suck, especially when they've had such good flat rate landline conditions for so long (compared to Europe).
The whole US thing with assigning mobile numbers to stationary physical area codes seems strange to me too.
The article was right about how good GSM is though. You can literally wander across the whole of Europe, and use just one phone everywhere. Actually, you can even use the same phone in the middle of the desert in Namibia (Africa), where the signal strength is surprisingly good. Is coverage really that bad in the US?
-- Steve
Worcester's basically the place that mothers tell their kids about to make them eat their vegetables or whatever. And it's not an interesting place.
Certainly I think we can all agree that there's nothing further out, that the cosmos more or less ends at 495 except for Worcester which is sort of barely attached by 9 and the Pike.
B-b-but surely! Worcester is where Worcester sauce comes from! How can that not be interesting!
And what was that about the 9? Worcester is on the 5 (the M5) halfway between Gloucester and Birmingham.
You'll be telling me next that Boston isn't in Lincolnshire.
Now, I don't know whether the cosmos ends near Worcester or Boston, but I can tell you that there's nothing of interest north of the Watford Gap (or west of Reading for that matter). What I want to know is why the Watford Gap isn't anywhere near Watford.
-- Steve
Oddly enough, there hasn't been that much CeBit stuff on /. in comparison to what is actually going on there. I've read articles about some really cool stuff. If you can read German, there's good coverage on the German tech news site Heise.
-- Steve
I'm pretty sure it was his voice I heard doing some narration at the beginning of Lord of the Rings.
-- Steve
You've covered the associated costs of the physical part, but you also have to include the fact that you are guaranteed a certain quality of picture/sound from the DVD which might not be the case for an online solution, you can watch the DVD whenever and as often as you like, and when you're fed up with it, you can sell it. The DVDs often have interviews, "making of" programmes and other bits and bobs which give them extra value. Also - no commercial breaks during the individual episodes.
Would an online solution provide all the same functioniality? Can I resell, and can I buy second hand? Can I (legally) borrow episodes off a friend to watch as I currently do with DVDs? A streaming-only solution might get around the "when" problem, possibly even the "how often" problem too, but would impose other limitations.
Without these freedoms, an online episode is not worth anywhere near the cost of the same episode on DVD.
Now here's a thing.. how many episodes does Friends S9 have? 20? At 20 mins each, that's 400 minutes of TV; at $30, a dollar buys you 13.333 minutes (not including any bonus material). That's roughly 4 times as long as a typical pop song, right? With this logic, a pop song should cost a quarter of what it does now, but the money-grabbing RIAA want to push the prices up.
My theory is this: if the price is too high, people won't buy! Especially for restricted items that cannot be resold or reused elsewhere. They (MPAA/RIAA et al) are DRMing themselves into a hole... it'll get worse for the buyer, but if somebody can offer a usable solution at a reasonable price, that'll effectively tip earth into the DRM hole, which turns it into their grave. They will be their own undoing!
-- Steve
all else equal.. two cores, two times the power, two times the heat..
You haven't been paying attention! Go back and read this article again (about AMD's demo of their dual core processor). While you're at it, read the related /. article.
The dual core processors use nowhere near double the power and produce nowhere near double the heat.
-- Steve
One thing that was an annoyance about OO.o 1.x was that you needed a complete new installation if you wanted a different language. I have users who have different language preferences using the same system, and while the desktop software (KDE in this case) can be switched, OO.o couldn't.
Well, that's now fixed in 2.0! You can add language packs to an existing installation! spec link
Yay!
-- Steve
PS. Anyone know if Firefox can/will support this functionality?
Actually, it is as simple as that!
There was a court case in Germany, where OEM versions of Windows were being sold without any machine. MS didn't like it and went to court, but the court told them they aren't allowed to place any restrictions on the resale of these legally bought items.
I can buy WinXP Home OEM (new) for 80 Euros right now, on its own, perfectly legally.
I don't think the one-PC-only thing is fair at all. It's very consumer-unfriendly.
-- Steve
What protects consumers from fraudulent merchants waving some kind of electronic cash-sucking wand by your back pocket which contains your wallet which contains your RFID Visa card? There's no mention of this in the article at all!
That's easy to answer! It's almost certainly based on the technology they already use.
VISA and others have been making smart cards for a while - they have a chip in which a smart card reader can talk to. You've probably seen cards with the contacts on the front already. The whole point of these cards is to cut down fraud, especially by card duplication. It's relatively easy to reproduce what is on the magnetic stripe, as the information is static.
These chips are used as part of an "online" transaction: the terminal (card reader) connects to the service provider's system, which in turn connect to VISA. VISA issues a challenge, the card's chip issues a response, and VISA verifies the card. This way, you can instantly detect fake or blacklisted cards. (If you lose your card, always call them immediately!) The challenge is unique every time, and a PIN/signature may still be required, possibly depending on the amount.
The retailer is guaranteed payment for such transactions, even it the charge is contested. Such online transactions cost the retailer more than offline ones, where the retailer takes the risk in case of fraud/chargeback. If you have to type in your PIN, it's online.
This new system will most likely be an extension of the smart card system. Even if somebody finds a way to challenge the card and get a response, they could only ever use that response against the same challenge from VISA for a charge on the exact same card. It may also be that the amount being charged affects the challenge and/or response too (I think so, but don't remember). It might be theoretically possible, but there is too much left to chance for it to be realistic. If they add an extra security layer to cover the wireless part, you are left with a very safe system.
If I wanted to get lots of money (illegally), I would turn my efforts to something which was easier and actually had a real chance of succeeding. Beware the old-fashioned pickpocket!
-- Steve
I call Quirk's exception!
Let the silliness continue!
Yes well, that doesn't help Joe Sixpack who reads "CLICK YES TO CONTINUE" and does it.
At least he read it! I know plenty of people who will just click OK without even looking at what they're agreeing to.
The trouble is that lots of people don't understand what is being asked of them (so many give up reading at all). Signed certificate? While I could explain what it is, how do you teach people to be able to choose the good from the bad? Some are definately not so easy to spot.
Ol' Joe should be more distrusting of these things, but isn't.
-- Steve
What about Outlook Express? What about the messenger? What about the movie maker?
All of these came with my copy of Windows, and they are major apps which have real competitors. I'm wondering if MS will also get forced to offer versions of Windows with them removed as well.
MS is in the unfortunate position of being recognised as being a monopoly that uses its position to have an (illegal) advantage over others. As you pointed out, they are trying to show they're not, but it won't work until they lose a very significant part of their market share. Until then, every time they try to use bundling (with Windows) to enhance their products, they will get scrutinised, and quite possibly dragged in front of the courts again.
As a comparison, have a look at what IBM went through after their whole monopoly thing. They went a long way out of their way to avoid trouble, and it really cost them. However, they managed to reinvent themselves, and I think it's actually done them good in the long run.
It's obvious enough what effect it would have if MS could no longer include certain apps with Windows. They'd still be available for download for those who wanted them, but imagine what it would be like if MS were not allowed to give them away at all. Would you pay for WMP, the messenger or the movie maker?
As you say, I think a stripped down version of Windows will encourage competition, and give people more of an incentive to consider alternatives.
-- Steve
Certainly, XP (also 2K, 2K3) would have been an interesting comparison. OSX, however, is out of the question - all of the others ran on exactly the same hardware, a dual 1GHz PIII system. The point of the test was to see operating differences, without the hardware being a factor.
Of course, it would be possible to run the tests on the same Mac under OSX, Linux and any other OS available for that platform. That might have been interesting, but you wouldn't be able to compare the results directly to those from the PIII system.
-- Steve
Poor sales for medical? I'll say - they don't even have a medical division! It was farmed off as part of Agilent, who then sold it to Philips.
-- Steve
More points:
Carly killed the HP of old, along with the whole "HP Way". I think she managed to turn it into the place that Bill and Dave originally wanted to get away from, which is most ironic. I wonder if anybody left HP to start up their own company in their garage.
HP actually used to be a quite inventive place; now they only have it in their logo. Their test and measurement stuff was second to none (and even went to the moon); I think Carly farmed that off as part of Agilent. See this for a discussion on laser printers, including about how earlier HP printers are much better than their current crop.
HP didn't ever want to compete on price, but they're not competing on quality either, so they will lose unless they do something drastic... and this may have been it.
-- Steve
Well, the German plural of ox (die Ochse) is "Ochsen," and in German, you do have multiple "Boxen."
If the person who wrote the submission was German, I'm willing to forgive them. However, as "Carl" claims to have been born in Philadelphia (presumably the newer one in the US, and not the older one in the Middle East), he needs beating with at least two wet fish. Maybe it was the fault of the apes, although the spell in Elbonia probably didn't help.
-- Steve
Are you crazy? Yggdrasil is far too difficult to pronounce!
Personally, I want an upgrade to my SLS. That's the real distribution. Who does this upstart Patrick Volkerding think he is, anyway?
-- Steve
It's pretty easy for an ISP to notice 100,000 emails from one sender pumping through their SMTP server...
That's the point though - they're not all from one sender anymore. If you Zombie 1000 PCs, and have each send 100 messages, you've still got your 100,000 and it's all from different people, so the traffic looks like lots of normal email, and as such you bypass the throttle.
I would guess that a lot of ISPs only do spam checking on mail coming in from outside, and not from their own users as that saves resources.
Like you say, there's still no excuse. I don't think these methods are entirely new, as this is generally how email viruses spread themselves. They should be checking all email, in and out, for spam and viruses, and rejecting bad email before it is queued (ie: the client can't even complete sending).
-- Steve
Well, I wouldn't hold your breath. It's certainly not impossible that the US patent system will be changed, but I don't see it happenning in the near future.
We'll have to first wait and see how the whole thing in Europe turns out. It's still possible that they say that any software algorithms can be patented. I think that is now quite unlikely. Another possibility is that they say no software patents at all - my favourite, but we may not see it happen. The third option would be that they come up with some definition of what is patentable, and we see some restricted form of software patents.
I think that third option is what a lot of them will be aiming for, but I think they will have a hard time getting enough people to agree on what should be patentable, in which case I think we're more likely to end up with no software patents at all, as a number of countries are very much against a free-for-all - Poland and Denmark have been mentioned already; the German parliament agreed that SW patents are not good (that's all 4 major parties, and they almost never all agree with each other), and there may be hope for the UK too. Certainly, the UK patent office is very aware of the problems that patent abuse can cause, as reported here, and maybe, just maybe, the governement will listen.
If the EU actually does rule against software patents, it will be a very compelling reason for IT companies to do development in the EU rather than in the US, and that is something that may trigger the US to review their system, but that will all take time.
Patents are supposed to encourage people to invent and disclose, so that everyone can benefit. If that is not happenning, then patents are not working and the goal is not being reached. Many are using patents as a form of protectionism, and this abuse is something that the EU now has a chance to address. I really hope they do.
-- Steve
Until now, Google was my preferred search engine, so that is what I am comparing against.
I clicked the link in the story, which brings up the main MSN page. It's yet another site that doesn't use the whole browser width (and that is getting really annoying). It's also full of crap I'm not interested in (more on that below) and I notice that it tried to pop something up.
There's an ad for their search, so I clicked that, but it redirects via atdmt.com, which is either a tracker site or an ad site. Either way, it was on my blocklist, so the browser went nowhere.
So far, not impressed.
Then it occurred to me that the search site is probably separate from the main MSN site, so I tried search.msn.com. Lo and behold, a lightweight page for entering my search query, in a similar manner to Google's. No ads on this page either! I liked that. OK, so the URL is a little longer than Google's, but these days I do my searching from that input field in the top-right corner of Konqueror/Firefox.
It also correctly detected which country I'm in - presumably from the IP address or hostname. (The MSN main page didn't, and gave me loads of US-centric stuff instead, which is what I meant by stuff I'm not interested in.) It also used localised text for the country I'm in (German). That's all well and good, but my browser settings actually specify en-gb first, so they get a point for being clever and detecting the country, but lose 10 points for completely ignoring my own preferences. I would expect the page in German if I went to msn.de, but the .com one shouldn't make such assumptions.
I tried searching for a few various things, and compared the results to Google. It seemed that some of the more obscure terms had better results in the MSN search. Certainly, each of the two would return a different set of results for the same query. I can't really say that one was definately better than the other - this is one of those things you have to try for yourself, and it will probably only become apparent after a non-trivial amount of usage.
One other thing that must be said to both MSN and Google: stop using bloody fixed width columns!
I have a screen width of 1280, and in this day and age, much larger sizes are becoming more common. I want the width used more effectively so I don't have to scroll down as much. The HTML isn't even difficult! Annoying things like this give people reason to choose one site over another.
-- Steve
...covering the entire floorspace of the victim's dwelling.